Month: January 2008

To Err Is Human, but It Requires an MBA To Create Total Clusterfu$% . . .

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I probably should include this in my standard economics update, but Barry Ritholtz’s line (my title) is too good not to give top billing.

He is talking about something called “Counter-Party Risk“, which is the risk that an issuer might default on a payment or go into liquidation. Also known as counter party risk.

Basically, he is continuing his ongoing riff on what will happen if monoline insurers go belly up, as increasingly seems likely.

He expects there to be a lot more “down” there, as do I. There is a lot of leverage, out there. For an MBA, it’s called leverage, for the rest of us, it’s called “being in debt up to our eyeballs”.

In describing the monoliners, MR. Ritholtz is right:

That situation was obviously intolerable. So they brought in the financial engineers. Hey, we should be issuing insurance on Credit Default Swaps (CDS) — the premiums are much much bigger than boring old munis!

Any time you hear words to that effect, you know you are dealing with an idiot of the highest magnitude. Those are the equivalent to “Give me a match, I want to see if there is any gas in the tank.”

The monolines are not in trouble because Municipalities are defaulting on bond payments. (That’s waaaay in the future). The problem is they wrote insurance — taking in that fat premiums — without properly understanding the risk.

….

I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat it again: To err is human, but it requires an MBA to create total clusterfu#@ . . .

My analogy, that like those people on American Idol whose friends have told them that they can sing. Is nowhere near as clear or as lyrical.

Are Brokers and Financial Professionals Like American Idol Contestants?

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Michael Lewis asks, “What’s odd about the subprime crash is Goldman Sachs Group Inc. A single firm took a position contrary to the rest of Wall Street. Giant Wall Street firms are designed for many things, but not, typically, to express highly idiosyncratic views in the market.”

Basically, what happened was that in 2006, some smart guys at Goldman, as they did at other places, went to senior management, and said that they thought that the Subprime market was soft, and that they should short it.

This probably a bit of advice that any number of brokerages got over that time, but how they handled it was different.

As opposed to reviewing the data, coming to a decision, and issuing guidance to the subprime traders based on that decision, Goldman Sachs has some different management structures. They

The only difference between Goldman and everyone else was that Goldman had, in effect, an entirely separate enterprise, sitting on top of the firm, with the power to reverse the judgment of its own supposed experts in various markets. They were able to do this, apparently, without ever saying a word about it to their own traders. Instead of telling the fools trading subprime mortgages that they are wrong, and that they should unwind their positions, they simply offset their trades.”

Rolling Heads

All across Wall Street risk managers are being fired, reassigned or hovering under a cloud of contempt and suspicion. Heads must roll, and after the CEO, these guys are the most plausible to guillotine.

But at the same time it’s pretty clear that a lot of these so-called risk managers never really had the power to manage risk. They had to consider the feelings, for example, of the guys who ran subprime mortgages. Morgan Stanley conceded as much when it said recently it was considering changing things around so that the risk manager reported to the CFO, rather than the heads of individual businesses.

But at Goldman there were two intelligences at work: one, the ordinary Wall Street intelligence, which was allowed to get itself in trouble, just as at every other Wall Street firm; the other, more like an extremely smart hedge fund that made its living off the idiocy of big Wall Street firms, including its own people.

(emphasis mine)
There is a frightening corollary to this, that the experts operating in high finance are less like dispassionate experts than they are like those people on American Idol whose friends have told them that they can sing.

Accusations of Inappropriate Pressure by WaMu on Appraisers

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I am so not shocked that Jeniffer Wertz is claiming that claiming she was blacklisted last year for providing a housing market forecast that was too gloomy.

In the lawsuit, which was filed a week ago, Wertz says she completed appraisals on two houses in May and then quickly got a call from a WaMu sales manager demanding she change her outlook to “stable” so a loan could be approved.

The WaMu sales manager also demanded Wertz change her appraisal process to produce higher prices for the properties she was evaluating, according to Wertz’s lawyer Stephen Danz. The higher an appraisal comes out, the more likely it is a home loan will get approved.

When Wertz refused to comply, she claims the sales manager threatened to block her from doing future appraisal work for the bank. A month later, Wertz’s suit says, a third-party appraisal request assigner told her WaMu would no longer accept her work.

I have no doubt that this is true, and that this was endemic in the lending industry among most, if not all of the major players.

Andrew Cuomo is alleging that WaMu’s pressure on “title company First American and its appraisal unit, eAppraiseIT” is why they were basically falsifying appriasals, and The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Office of Thrift Supervision has opened an investigation.

I think that it will be more difficult to find a major lender who did not do this than to find one who did.

Bernanke supports stimulus package – Jan. 17, 2008

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Bernanke speaks out in favor of a stimulus package, and he is saying that it should help “beleagered consumers” and that it “should be explicitly temporary”.

While he does speak favorably of some temporary tax credits for business investment too, he is not repeating Alan “Bubbles” Greenspans incompetence, and endorsing massive permanent tax cuts.

He’s already put himself well ahead of Ayn Rand’s acolyte in the competence department.

Is a Password Protected by the 5th Amendment?

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There is a general principal in US law, that one can be compelled to turn over physical evidence, but not the contents of one’s mind, as that is protected by the 5th amendment.

So, you can be compelled to turn over a key to a lock, but not a combination. There is a fairly long legal precedent.

This case asks what it means if the lock is unbreakable, or nearly so.

Case in brief: A Canadian, on crossing the US border, was told to show the contents of his hard drive, which he did, and some of the contents were deemed by the border guard to be likely child porn, though it’s unclear of this was simply random files in the cache, or Manga, or real kiddie porn.

The machine was confiscated, and subsequently turned off.

When it was restarted, its demanded a password, since the contents had been encrypted with PGP, and were inaccessible, and Magistrate Judge Jerome J. Niedermeier has ruled that compelling him to turn over his password violates the 5th amendment.

The prosecutors are appealing saying the standard stuff about terrorism, etc.

I’m with Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, who has said, “The consequence of this decision being upheld is that the government would have to find other methods to get this information, but that’s as it should be. That’s what the Fifth Amendment is intended to protect.”

He’s right. If you hooked up this guy’s drive to a supercomputer, and ran it for a few months, and maybe less if you brought in some experts from the NSA, at the cost of a few million dollars, you’d probably crack the password, because even the best people don’t choose truly random passwords.

Inconvenient, yes, but inconvenience is not a basis for emasculating the Bill of Rights.

I generally oppose any granting any power to the government to either judge one based on the contents of one’s mind (hate crime laws), or to force revalation of the contents of one’s minds.

See In Child Porn Case, a Digital Dilemma.

Militants Cultivated By Pakistani ISI Now Out of Control

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The Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, has for some time cultivated networks of militants, with the idea of being to control them.

Well, it appears now that these militants are saying, “So long and thanks for all the fish.”

As the military has moved against them, the militants have turned on their former handlers, the officials said. Joining with other extremist groups, they have battled Pakistani security forces and helped militants carry out a record number of suicide attacks last year, including some aimed directly at army and intelligence units as well as prominent political figures, possibly even Benazir Bhutto.

The growing strength of the militants, many of whom now express support for Al Qaeda’s global jihad, presents a grave threat to Pakistan’s security, as well as NATO efforts to push back the Taliban in Afghanistan. American officials have begun to weigh more robust covert operations to go after Al Qaeda in the lawless border areas because they are so concerned that the Pakistani government is unable to do so.

This was absolutely forseeable. It was a marriage of convenience on both sides.

In a very real way, it mirrors the US relationship with Pakistan….And the House of Saud….And the sh^%tty little oil monarchies all across the Gulf….etc.

Study: John Edwards Doesn’t Exist

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TMP makes note of an interesting study byThe Project for Excellence in Journalism has released its latest campaign coverage index for January 6-11.

John Edwards is apparently a figure of the voters’ imagination, though it appears that NY Times Ombudsman Public Editor Clark Hoyt shares the public’s delusion.

I could make some sort of pithy statement about corporate media, but instead, I’ll just call the coverage wankeriffic.

Signs of the Apocalypse, Hillary Clinton Is Very, VERY, Funny

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It’s also very, very savvy, it strokes the ego of her press corps. She
played flight attendant over the loud speaker, welcoming people aboard “Hil Force One”, and declaring, among other things, that, “FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) regulations prohibit the use of any cell phones, BlackBerrys, or wireless devices that may be used to transmit a negative story about me”.

Bush to Hold Stimulus Package Hostage

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Read the article about the Bush Administration strategies.

The stimulus is needed now, but veto anything that does not extend Bush’s disastrous tax cuts, which would otherwise end in 2011.

The fact is that sticking with appallingly bad tax policies in order to create a relatively modest stimulus package is a bad idea both in terms of the well being of the republic, and in terms of politics, and the Democrats should be willing to walk away from the table if this is a condition.

Of course, they will drop the soap instead.